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It was the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and South Africa had just returned to the Games after three decades as a pariah nation. A friend had tipped me off the night before: If you’re looking for a good story, the first black athlete to represent South Africa at the Olympics has a boxing match at 6 a.m.

That’s who I’d come for, sloshing through a sleeping city in the pouring rain.

There were no other journalists present, hardly anybody at all except for coaches and officials. Yawning, barely conscious, I looked around the vast Pavello del Club de Basquet Joventut de Badalona and spotted a single spectator awaiting the opening bout. I squinted. Could that possibly be . . . ? Golly, it is.

I climbed up a hundred or so steps, approaching shyly. May I speak with you, sir?

His security detail began to move in, but Mandela waved them off. “Yes, of course,” he said, kindly. “But please, let us talk only about boxing.”

He had taken an aisle seat. I squatted on the step next to him, at one point surreptitiously reaching out my hand to stroke the tip of his highly polished shoe. He caught me and chuckled. “I’m not a statue, young lady.”

No, merely an icon, a hero of our time. And I was trembling.

This was two years after Mandela had been released from prison, two years before he became president of South Africa. But he was already presidential, a statesman-citizen who wore his nearly three decades of incarceration with dignity.

I have visited the tiny cell he occupied on desolate Robben Island, where he wrote the original version of his memoirs on small scraps of paper smuggled to allies outside. No cell or cage could contain his mind, his aspirations for humanity.

As President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the announcement that beloved Mandela — a “profoundly good human being” — had died peacefully at age 95, Madiba now belongs to the ages. “The day he was released from prison it gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears.”

In his youth, Mandela had been an amateur boxer and all-around gifted athlete. While in prison, he would regularly ask his wife, Winnie, to relay news of big prize fights. In the early years, his jailers would not even allow Mandela to receive newspaper reports. Later, he was permitted to keep a radio and listened to fights. Boxing was the second most popular sport in South Africa, he reminded me that day in Barcelona, behind soccer — and rugby for white fans.

For the longest time, South Africans couldn’t even watch Olympic boxing on TV because the International Olympic Committee forbade any televised feed of the Games into that segregated, isolated nation.

Mandela was reluctant to discuss his own boxing career. “That was in my younger days. But our boxing of the time as compared with the boxing of today was something absolutely primitive.”

Down below, a wiry man in red trunks climbed into the ring — the Young Fighter. Far above, Mandela leaned forward keenly — the Old Fighter.

The boxer’s name was Abram Hkewafana Thwala, a 22-year-old pugilist from Soweto — senior national champion in the light flyweight division in 1991. He did not have an easy time of it. Mandela provided play-by-play commentary.

With a stiff right arm and hesitant left jabs, Thwala lost unanimously to his Spanish opponent. But the memory that lingers is of Thwala being urged on by a white teammate and a white coach wiping perspiration from the young man’s face.

“He is a fighter but I think that he didn’t use his right as much as he should have,” Mandela observed.

He was immensely pleased nonetheless. This was a victory for his nation, despite the outcome.

“I think we should remember that our own people have been out of international sports for a long time,” Mandela said. “Next time, in Atlanta, I am hoping that we will do much better.”

Mandela always grasped the nation-building power of sports. When South Africa won the Rugby World Cup in 1995, on its own soil, the president famously donned the green jersey and cap of the Springboks when presenting the trophy to a white team captain. He signalled that rugby, a white man’s game, could be just another field of reconciliation. Endlessly, Mandela was all about healing the rifts, binding the wounds.

I don’t recall what else we talked about in Barcelona. Afterward, I was horrified by the scant notes I’d taken.

Mandela lingered to watch a few more matches. At some point, news leaked that the great man was at the boxing venue because suddenly a horde of journalists and TV crews descended, breathless, pushing, and my “exclusive” had disappeared. The protection officers tolerated a brief scrum before pulling Mandela out of the crush. But he winked at me before he left.

Eight years later, I met Mandela again. I was in Durban covering the 13th International AIDS Conference and talked my way into a closed session that was being filmed as a TV special, with Mandela and President Bill Clinton taking questions from an audience of young people, all of them in awe over the dual celebrities. Both, in their way, were rock stars.

I sidled in close and clasped Mandela’s hand.

South Africa had been ravaged by AIDS and Mandela’s successor, President Thabo Mbeki, had provoked international outrage by embracing crackpot theories that posited factors others than HIV as the cause of the condition. Mbeki, in a speech during the conference, speculated that endemic poverty and malnutrition might be responsible for the HIV sub-strain most common among Africans.

Mandela spoke truth to the lies. As ever, he was the conscience of a nation, yet picked his words carefully so as not to embarrass Mbeki.

“Too much attention has been directed toward a dispute that is unintentionally distracting us from real life-and-death issues we are confronting as a country,” he said.

“I mean no disrespect if I say that (this conference) is one event where every word uttered has to be measured against the effect it has on the lives of millions of human beings all over this continent and the planet.

“One thing 27 years in prison taught me was to use the silence of solitude to realize how precious words are.”

Mandela’s eldest son would die of AIDS in 2005.

Three years ago, I was in Johannesburg for the World Cup — a global spectacle that was awarded to South Africa by FIFA largely on Mandela’s efforts. Despite widespread skepticism they could pull it off, the country put on a wonderful, joyful event.

I watched the Spain-Netherlands final in a Soweto shebeen just down the street from where teenager Hector Peterson was shot down in the brutally crushed student uprising of 1976. A hush fell over the bar as Mandela, bundled up against the chill at beautiful Soccer Stadium, made a stately progress to his seat in a golf cart. He’d pulled out of the opening ceremonies after the death of his great-granddaughter in a car accident only hours before. It was not at all certain that he’d attend the final.

Yet there he was, elegant wife Graca Machel at his side, beaming as he waved to the crowd, 85,000 rising to their feet for a thunderous ovation, all that love pouring forth for a man once convicted of treason, the prisoner to president who had presided over the birth of a democratic South Africa.

He was a few days shy of his 91st birthday and many wondered if this would be Mandela’s final public appearance.

Wondered, too, what they would ever do when he was gone. It was impossible to imagine a South Africa or a world without Mandela in it.

We did not want to relinquish him. Now we must let go.

At the Durban conference, Mandela had spoken about his visit with a 16-year-old boy who was dying of AIDS, the teenager more concerned about the disgrace he had brought to his family. Mandela told him: “Don’t think you will leave your family, your people, your country, under a cloud of shame. You must be determined that you will disappear under a cloud of glory.”

And then Mandela quotes from Shakespeare, words the playwright had put into the mouth of Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

He was among the most valiant of all and he leaves us in a cloud of glory.

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